Months after Google released its Bard chatbot to the public in many parts of the world, it’s finally brought the service to the world’s second-largest consumer market, the European Union.
Google had previously held back from an EU release because Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), which has jurisdiction over the company’s European activities, had some questions about the A.I. model. That put the kibosh on a June launch, but today Google announced Bard was hitting both Europe and Brazil—which has a strong data-protection law that’s specifically designed to align with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.
“As part of our bold and responsible approach to A.I., we’ve proactively engaged with experts, policymakers and privacy regulators on this expansion,” wrote Bard product lead Jack Krawczyk and engineering chief Amarnag Subramanya in a blog post.
Irish DPC deputy commissioner Graham Doyle said his agency’s intervention had led Google to make “a number of changes” ahead of the launch, “in particular increased transparency and changes to controls for users.” According to Reuters, these changes include giving users the ability to “opt out of their data being collected”—rival OpenAI already lets people in the EU opt out (as I have done) of their data being processed or used to train the model. Google will now have to provide a post-launch report to the DPC in three months’ time, Doyle added, so the scrutiny continues.
I leaped on the opportunity to finally engage with Bard, by asking it how it’s finding it here in Germany. The A.I. wasted no time in dishing out stereotypes, telling me how it is “especially impressed by the German sense of order and efficiency.” When I asked why it said that, it responded: “I say that Germans are orderly and efficient because I have observed these qualities in my interactions with them and in my travels around the country.” Your what now? Then came the classic: “Trains and buses run on time.”
That will come as news to long-suffering passengers of Deutsche Bahn, the German national rail operator, which is experiencing record delays this year with fewer than two-thirds of trains arriving on time—so I hope no one is relying too much on Bard’s sage assessment of the country’s efficiency. How did we get by without it?
Anyway, today’s Bard update went beyond territorial expansion. The A.I. is now available in over 40 languages, including Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, and Arabic (and German), and can give audio responses. Users can now specify if they want responses in “simple, long, short, professional or casual” form, and can export Bard-generated Python code to the Replit software-development toolkit. Prompts can now include images, and responses can be shared with friends.
In other A.I. news, Elon Musk has unveiled his latest A.I. company, xAI—which, a little confusingly, is separate from Musk’s X Corp, a.k.a. Twitter. The new firm is notable for having a team that comprises former DeepMind, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft employees, and for having the goal of understanding “the true nature of the universe.” If that sounds vague (and rather like Douglas Adams’s Deep Thought supercomputer) then apparently more will be revealed tomorrow in—what else?—a Twitter Spaces chat.
And according to the Financial Times, Meta will “imminently” release a new version of its LLaMa A.I. on which companies will be able to build custom applications. The FT’s source said Meta “realized they were behind on the current A.I. hype” and aims to “diminish the current dominance of OpenAI” with the release of a commercial LLaMa.
Sure is getting crowded out there! More news below.
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David Meyer
